Ours
by brombones
Summary: Moments throughout Rebekah and Klaus' long life in various time periods and places. I wanted to do a fic with little glimpses of their massive story with their epic bond. I just love these two. Klebekah. Warning incest theme/maybe graphicness in future chapters. CHAPTER 3- GAUL. REVIEWS FEED ME! sorry for the late update :) my muse is fickle as shit. i love to hear suggestions!
1. Japan

_Dead my old fine hopes_  
_And dry my dreaming but still..._  
_Iris, blue each spring_  
― Shushiki

**Japan.**

**June 1915**

I was no artist.

It was simply rain, ceaseless, immutable rain. I could do nothing in my mind to train the image into anything beautiful, anything less banal or deleterious than the heavy, drumming, drowning bore of a Japanese summer.

My hair stuck to my face and neck in the way I hate, my curls deflated, symbolic of my whole drained personhood. Energy was a luxury in such an oppressive climate, and the thin pink muslin around my knees felt damp. It was so tiresome, the discomfort of jungle haze.

The great war in Europe raged still. I had heard men call it the 'war to end all others', but is that not how it always was? Nik and I would exchange a look, his bored. For centuries men had used the excuse of their prodigy to exercise the most demonic of massacres, but in the end they harvest a peace grown from the blood of war. And a bite into just one of those unholy berries? An unblessed gift to a child, for we of all people know what blood can do.

News was scarce here, in the still-water rainforests of East Asia, but my brother had taken me away from London. He said it may be many years yet before the French and the Germans tired of their indefatigable and pathetic rivalry. Many people would die, as they always did, and those that would be lucky enough to remain would be expected to stay. To rebuild. To remember. To grip the past with pride that would cripple the future. And to stay? That is one thing Nik and I could never do.

I was bored without my London friends. People I had met under the guise we created, a wealthy brother and his charge back from Rhodesia where our parents had settled with the rest of the European colonists. Japan was quiet. It was far too quiet for a mind that had spent a millennia turning over the dullness of rain.

I couldn't hear the pen over the deluge of water assaulting the roof. It was a hollow and aching sound, as if by smacking the bamboo, the rain merely expressed the absence of matter between the circular shoots and not the concussion against the bamboo itself. I believe it was a very Buddhist thought to have. The appropriateness of it may have amused me.

"What are you thinking, sister," Nik asked, leg crossed atop his knee on the other side of the bungalow. His sketchbook was curling at all four corners from the humidity, and his hands were muddy with the wet, uncooperative coal.

Some people might think it rude, the way I stare. Or the server girl did, I could tell, by the way she looked at me strangely when I did not answer him. She set down a precious glass pot, steaming tea, and left, no doubt wondering why we lounged in the screened room when it rained so mercilessly.

I could tell by the way he was looking at me that he had no interest in hearing my answer. He was drawing me. Asking only rhetorically, hoping to catch the solution to his inquiry only through the scratches of coal and blur of smudged hatch points where he would indicate rain, the positive space where my face would gaze from the foreground.

I would not give away the answer and ruin it for him.

"Don't you ever grow tired of drawing me," I asked, lounging lazily, elbow on the ridge of the window. I watched the river outside, the near and distant plots of shining green trees over blued mangroves. They looked like islands. There was a mountain in the distance like a solid sleeping creature. I saw a bird, black and brilliant with wings as grand as a kite at the World's Fair, dip into the trees like a fearsome dart.

"Never."

"You've drawn me for centuries," I said, countering, almost annoyed. "Aren't you bored yet?" the question had acid to it, the tone burned my tongue and flared with a heat antithetical to the solemn and balanced rain.

It was then that he glanced up for the second time.

"Could I grow bored of such everlasting beauty? Unchangeable."

I rolled my eyes at his base flattery. My brother with the forked tongue of a snake. But in his eyes I saw the pit of truth, ugly and hopeless as it might be. So I smiled dimly. Truth was worth such a thing.

"I love you, Niklaus."

"Rebekah," he said, "Your love is like the sun, and my cold heart the moon." I looked at him more intently, awaiting the soothing attitude of his voice, but not expecting their turn. "You burn endlessly, destructively. And I, naught more than a lightless rock destined to eternally encircle the earth."

I saw his pen stop but for a moment.

"And it is only this - pacing, cold and dark- I would remain, but for you. Lucky I am to glow icy white because of the sun's reflective gold."

When he finally moved to display the drawing my eyes scanned it for his sake only. I traced my thumb over his lip, guided his face to mine. I saw his stone eyes, and the soft surprise buried beneath centuries of rhythm.

The only thing worth living for.


	2. Russia

**Russia **

**December 1771**

Catherine had been a friend of ours.

Her taste for… the occult and the uncommon led my brother and I to the snow-dusted streets of St. Petersburg as the 18th century keeled.

Nik stood us clear of the war in America, the fledgling New Order.

Such was but a whisper and a dream in Europe. A dream that the anarchists in poverty-stricken France prayed anxiously might finally harbinger the genesis of their radical fantasy: that men might finally dictate their own individual destinies.

The abject, the abundant, were always searching for an escape. What was different about this was that there was finally none to be had: no liquor that could erase the sorrow, no food that could satiate the misery of starvation, no prayer was answered for the destitute as if all their Heaven's gates had been welded shut from the inside.

I was skirted around the realities of the wretched poor in fine carriages and bundled velvet, but the slow passage of years had so far led me to resist blindness. The Revolution in America was definitively downplayed by the officials in Europe, but as always, information could not be stymied by force alone. And neither could I.

As the pages of history sometime afford, this dream, by the ravenous greed of the few, earned an accidental chance of reality. I was reminded of my mother, who had put her soft fingers into my hair: _there must be a balance._

America was the drastic hope, the promise land, a place where men would be enslaved by no greater power, no absolutism, where no man would stand above others as nominal King and order the remainder as if given dominion over their souls. The world was beginning, in its most green of forms, to shake off the shackles of the dark ages: another man's religion, another man's law, another man's vendetta.

It was the early stages of a revolution that sparked fear into the hearts of all the monarchies in the Old World. I smelled the acrid reek of terror in the great halls of the Winter Palace, where even far removed in outlandish luxury the Tsars and royals with whom my brother kept company could not turn their nose up at the stench of malcontent.

And so surprisingly I _craved_ this.

More than hunger had ever struck me, I desired nothing more than to return to our homeland and witness the rebirth of man, ruler of his own dominion. I felt a kinship stronger than anything else I had ever entertained, no idea in all my centuries had moved me with such intensity and brotherhood… as if the idea had come from my very bones as well as nameless men across uproarious oceans.

To satisfy my need to rebel I passed secret letters along from quiet insurgents to double-agents in the Winter and Summer palaces. I acted as a courier, disguising the missives of a fetal uprising as love letters, perfumed and sealed with my lipstick.

It was a bitingly cold day when Nik confronted me about it.

The dark fur pulled around my shoulders cocooned me as tightly as a swaddled infant, and Nik walked alongside me as we passed the motionless iron bodies of petrified memories- statues in the square, rulers I would pester him for information on, while he critiqued the form and style of the actual art.

He felt formidable beside me, wearing a weighty coat of black that swung like a reaper's cape to his ankles, with boxed white fur around the collar. The ushanka clasped around his head let angular shadows fall from darkened cheekbones in the white-cold light of the capital.

I was admiring the décor. It was Christmas extravagance and I was stricken with the spirit. It was days before Nik walked with me throughout the palace, smile lingering beneath clever features as I clapped with glee to see the architecture transformed.

Now outside, holly and pine garland was woven like lace over baroque palace columns. Great red bows draped archways, sparkling white flowers and glittering glass hung like birds over windows. And the centerpiece of it all, the tree that stood apart at the corner of the palatial grounds. It was too far from the populace to be truly appreciated for all the overindulgence that hung upon every branch, a wink shy of clear eyesight from the roadway.

Oh, it glowed like with magic! Thousands of candles warming the chill of dusk and a star atop it all as beautiful as any perched in the sky. For all that excess was damning, it was beyond captivating. And for anyone lucky enough to be in its presence… they could not resist the awe creeping up inside, the shutter of one's heart, the way I stretched my gloved hand out towards the enchantment, as if I might sap some of the splendor for myself.

It was then that he shoved me, and the ground was cold, frozen, under my palms as I met it immediately. The force of the blow left me shocked, as if a stake of ice was thrust through my lungs and before I could turn he hauled me up again. My knees felt weak, and the few passersby that dared to pause where black silhouettes only.

"What are you doing!" I shouted, aghast. I reeled for my composure, but he looked too fearful in the firelight from the massive tree behind me. Funny how something so gentle could so quickly be stripped of innocence.

His gait was like an animal, furious and he stalked towards me. I stepped back on my heel and it snapped under the weight of my trembling limbs. He lunged and trammeled my arm in his hand, not so much preventing me from falling but winding me closer as I writhed in his grip. "Sister, you _are_ a fool," he breathed into my cheek with such fury as he was wont to snap. I could feel his lips pressed to my skin and the rage hot on his breath.

I struggled in his grip. "What are you talking about! Let me go!"

He shoved me back with such power that I nearly lost my footing once more.

"Did you honestly think your little shenanigans would not reach the eyes and ears of those with _vested interest_ in the continuation of this!" he held his arms out. The span of his arms was vast as an albatross, great and heavy and purposeful. He signaled as if his words entangled all of the glamor of the great palace, all of the riches in Russia, all of the gold beneath the ice. "Little sister! There are people who are after your _head_. Not just people—_our_ kind of people!" he announced, as if sharing it with me in confidence and it was some great big bloody obvious secret that I had been too stupid to see for myself.

Vampires were everywhere, in the new world and old, but I had no idea that others lived in the palace with us. The revelation came as a shock to me, for yes, we could outrun royals who wanted my head, but _immortals?_ They could do worse than attempt murder. They could spread word of our presence anywhere we might go. Blackmail us. Destroy us if not destroyed first.

"Nik," my eyes felt wider than denga coins, I felt fear catapult into my throat like the bite of an asp. I fought for words as tears assaulted my frigid skin. _I'm sorry, _I wanted to say, _I'm sorry, brother._

He crushed his lips together as if growling silently, shoved his hands in his pockets. I watched his glance sideways, a motionless specter in a dark coat, the tree burning brightly behind him like the white oak of ages past. "It's alright, Rebekah," he said finally, anger kissing the edges of his words as he wrestled for tolerance.

I sobbed quietly in the cold, my coat dirty, the furs torn.

I felt his arms around me moments later. A wall of warmth in a sea of trouble that was all my own.

"They're all dead, 'Bekah," he informed me methodically. I nodded into his jacket as he stroked my hair. "I killed them for you."

How many dead? Maybe dozens, our own deaths most likely feigned with them. The palace vampires who knew my secret, perhaps even my revolutionary friends with whom I shared confidence. The ones with such surreptitious but bright promise. The thought of them slaughtered cemented my pain so solidly in my chest that I could hardly stand. If Nik was not there to hold me up, I would have crumpled to the cold stone.

I knew we would have to leave now. Another life left behind.

"Nn, my love," he cooed. I could tell he was both annoyed and dismantled by my tears. I was unaware of the time that past when he finally pulled me away, holding my shoulders and looking at my swollen eyes with honest discernment. A flash of concern through the ire.

"I'm sorry, Nik," I sniffed, shaking my head. He nodded. There was no sense in any waiting now. Our travel must be immediate.

"To think, I was all excited about the opera this evening," he said, pulling me close in to his side as he walked back towards the palace. He voice was a strange amalgam of chipper and cross. "You owe me opera tickets."

I wasn't listening. I was thinking of my friends. The brilliant young boy with the dark hair and spark in his eyes, who liked to recite his theories in secret by the fields on the outer edges of the city. The man with the glasses at the bookshop, so wise and kind. The palace orderly, the young Lady who he served, her new husband. The man in the village with connections to a network of underground press, who took a chance on me. Dead.

As we approached the stables, Nik compelled us a ride we would not be returning from. Opening the sleek carriage door for me he offered a hand. I took it numbly and climbed inside.

It was hours and hours later that I awoke. Through bleary eyes and with sore limbs I tolerated the ride through unfamiliar landscape. Though my grief would have afforded me more and deeper sleep I was caught by the sight of my brother. He was awake. Silent. Staring at me while I dozed unconscious.

"Why, Rebekah?" was his only question, as if the hours spent in solitude had afforded him the time to reflect, to absorb the heaviness of gravity.

I blinked the sleep from my eyes and sat up. I looked back at him for a long moment, no reason coming to my sleep-addled mind. His gaze was unrelenting, stone, inescapable.

"I just wanted to help them feel free," I said suddenly. "I wanted to feel free."

Nik's gaze iced at my final words, an invisible shift in attitude anyone who did not know his heart would miss, like trying to decipher the moment the edge of grey dusk hardens into black night.

"Go to sleep, Rebekah," he said bitterly, and spoke no more, closing his eyes.

I was left with the feeling of guilt as I watched him sleep, unable to find any more of my own.

His own words had sounded so like an accusation of betrayal.


	3. Gaul

**Gaul**

**October 1349**

I knew that I could not die, and yet it felt as if I were dying.

To an immortal, the notion of death was skirted to the edges of the mind, left to wither in the desert of the subconscious. There the unimportant fades, rotting like excess after a feast. Death was excess to us. Superfluous to life, not necessary. We had broken the shackles tethering us to the cyclical prison of existence.

We merely lived on, and for nearly four-hundred years the idea of death, of murder, of earthly impermanence had been a trifle to us. It was time to learn our lesson.

I soon learned that nature even had its way of balancing the untouchable.

The pain I felt was impossible.

The plague swept over Europe like a putrid wind, with ease, and terror, and all the swiftness one would expect from the reaper's blackness. Cities fell and colors faded. The world physically shifted, as if muting into grey, as if filtering color through a sieve and leaving the soulless body of the world behind for creatures to remark upon like a forest after winter. Music was silenced as mandolins gathered dust, their players' hands dead upon their strings.

Kings decayed upon their thrones, children putrefied in the streets. Corpses piled up like leaves fallen from trees and decomposed in half-rigid spectacles of life's fragility, skeletal faces peeking out from blackened, bulbous skin.

Villages were quarantined. People murdered one another in the street, slept beside the cadavers of loved ones, willing to welcome death's sweet slumber rather than survive another day in the terror of reality.

It was chaos of the like that we had never seen, pandemonium and unrest. Society's already brittle order disintegrated like ash in a gale. We were frightened, Niklaus, Kol and I. For we had spent too many centuries bathed in the richness of our own everlasting promise, and had neglected to observe the world around us as more than a plaything, as more than pathetic, struggling.

A harmless joke never needing to be taken seriously.

Elijah had come from the East to warn us of the severity of the epidemic, but his counsel was too late. Droves of those in the orient fell to the mysterious plague, and thus his journey upon the Silk Road was mired with dropping caravans and stricken merchants, and too delayed.

By the time he arrived, our childish obliviousness and flippant concern over the illness which overwhelmed the peasants in the villages beyond the castle had turned into something far darker and terrifying.

Those are the days I remember of desperation and distress, and a horror that, even for us, survival was an uncertainty.

.

Only weeks before Elijah's arrival, Niklaus has stormed through the stone corridors of the castle, frightening the beggar girls who worked tirelessly upon tapestries and buried their eyes into the work of tiny needles through luxurious threads.

"Leave!" he roared. I was shocked by his unprovoked wrath, startled from my needlework, and watched the handmaidens flitter from the room like a frantic school of trout. I looked upon him, a sense of movement below taut and unyielding muscles even as he moved not, sinewy like a lion and fearsome in his impatient disarray.

"What's happened?" I asked, wide eyes upon him.

"Rebekah," he said, a wolfish step brought him to my body in an instant. His hands gripped like painful shackles to my shoulders, and I saw the arc of fear in the blue of his eyes, the sun from the arched window bathing the bones of his face in white light. I was transfixed by the golden specks in his irises of ice. "They're dying, Rebekah. All of them. The humans."

"The plague?" I questioned dumbly, shocked at this news for our castle had remained mostly untouched. "Must we leave?"

He bit at his bottom lip with such ferocity I thought he might draw blood, and inhaled with disgust at me (or himself?). He snarled as he turned away, releasing me and expressing to the sky. "We can't!"

I waited for his explanation, watching him, blonde hair like feathers falling on the sides of his jaw, daggering strands across his eyes. "Nik, you're frightening me," and he was.

My brother was known for his tempestuous fits, but his blatant disregard for masking his concern struck me with more seriousness than anything else ever could. Niklaus was himself my twin, his soul fixed to mine, and without effort he could speak his mind to me in these days when he still would choose to.

But for him to show fear so readily. I had not seen such a thing in many centuries, for that is what it was.

"All the passenger ships are empty, Rebekah." He looked to me, his tone quiet now. His moods were as transient and as capricious as a storm which raged to feed the flowers. "There is hardly any left to helm them. Hardly any left to send missive. "

His breath shook with rattled fury, rage at himself, I could tell.

"None left?" disbelief in my tone. "What do you mean none left? Surely there are people. There are people, Nik." I asserted.

But there were not.

"I saw something at the crossroads today." He revealed this detail only after looking away from my eyes.

"What was it," I asked, studying him with great concern. "Nik."

"Corpses, Rebekah," he informed me, still not meeting my eyes. "Starved."

Such information was far from a revelation, as Kol had returned many days from trips afield with similar descriptions.

"They were vampires." Nik looked to me, blue eyes stilled on mine. "Desiccating."

And then the fear struck.

.

Upon Elijah's arrival the sickness had spread upwind to the village outside our Chateau du Lapin. The green fields along the castle walls were desolate. The village a ghost city. The castle empty. We had drank them all.

We had eaten everyone left.

"We must abandon this castle, Niklaus," Elijah pressed his point from his chair at the long dining hall in our silenced stone rooms, but he was weak. We all were, and his fight was dimmed. "There is nothing left. There is no one left." The joy at seeing my brother again was tainted by the pang of starvation.

"And to where would we flee, Elijah?" Kol asked, ravenous and erratic as always, the struggle only serving to exacerbate those traits. "The glistening golden shores of the Moors? Surely you cannot be so stupid as to think the sickness has not yet spread to the South. To believe such is a child's prayer, simple, pathetic! " My brother spoke with such vehement, his wild eyes and dangerous volatility masking fear and desperation and hunger.

Nik had grown, had changed in this time. Yes, we could still grow, even in hundreds of years could still change. I learned that then.

I looked at him, postured at the head of the table like a King, his temper quiet as my brothers quarreled like the two pendulum voices of good and evil.

Elijah glared Kol down, though his journey through the sickness-swamped East had made him weak and hungry, his impatience for Kol's sharp and insolent tongue burned still in his level gaze. "Do you advocate a superior plan? Please- enlighten us, my younger and more _insightful_ brother, so full of worthy counsel. I would only wish to be educated on the finer points of your _nonexistent_ suggestions."

These times wore Elijah's patience thin.

I sucked quietly and tiredly on the carcass of a rabbit. The kind usually found in abundance in the fields that surrounded our fortress, but as the humans died, the vampires struggled to eat, and had wiped the forests clean. My lips stung not from the watery, unsatisfying taste of the animal blood that glistened upon them, but they were cracked and sore from starvation. From the exhaustion that was beginning to creep into all of us.

Even Nik with his lion's strength seemed weary, grim, and solemn from the unsatisfying diet of forest ilk.

"Shut up, both of you," he announced caustically, tired of their bickering. I was thankful for it. "We have to go," he finally decided. "Elijah's right, there's naught left here. What would you bloody well prefer? To stay here and live off sodding squirrels and scavenging birds like some provincial trash? Base paupers? It is below us, brother. It _displeases _me." He spoke directly to Kol, the petulant animal in my younger brother quieting under Nik's iron gaze. "Gather your things and help Rebekah. We leave at dawn."

To where? We did not know.

.

I said before that I felt as if I were dying. That I learned in this time the definition of death, grew to understand the murky hours and stranded fear mortals wasted upon its shadow through their lives.

We travelled from village to village. The four of us, and Kol mused irritatingly on the poetry of it, "_Four horses of the apocalypse!" _he would say cheerily into the empty wind, as we would come upon another abandoned village, wreaking with the stench of death and still cindering with the stillness of the imaginable chaos of its final days.

The smell was so potent and putrid I could have fainted if I did not press the handkerchief to my nose so tightly, inhaling the pungent and burning scent of the peppermint oil I had drenched it with.

.

We rode for weeks without finding shelter. I could see on the faces of my brothers that they were astounded by this turn of the world. That they realized, perhaps for the first time, that there were things unseen yet to be witnessed.

I was so hungry, how could I keep riding? My body felt as if it were slowly coming apart, whittled too thin, seams molding open, eyes burning from the brightness of the sun.

And the looks that Kol would give me from his horse were cannibalistic and deranged.

One day he acted upon the urge.

Nik condemned him to the ground with the fury of the thunderbolt before I realized what had happened. The sound of Kol's body hurtling into the roadway and the struggle of his breath was instantaneous.

Nik's boot ground into his throat with such wrath that I thought he would decapitate our brother once and for all, leaving us forever and always separated from him.

Niklaus' eyes were feral, rage-filled, teeth bared like the wolf I knew rested within him, under the layer of muscle, burning to claw through at every moment, every peak of passion or fury. He spit his words like venom, like a tiger's vice-like jaw, like they bore up from the very hellish pit of him, still flaming as they fell off from his vicious, mercurial tongue.

"You do not _touch_ her. You do not _act _upon your will but _mine! _You do not _breathe _without my permission." His roar quieted to a fearsome, shaking whisper. "You do not live without it."'

Kol clawed at his boot, and Elijah watched on in horror, only at the very last of available moments daring to voice his protest.

.

It was weeks until we pleaded our case into the castle of a prince who was so selfish, so irredeemable, that he had managed to spare his household the terrors of the plague by his lack of virtue alone. His natural affinity for selfishness lead to greedy survivalism, to closing his gates early on, to ravishing self-sufficiency in the face of unimaginable disaster.

Nik compelled our way in, promised him riches of the like he could not possible conceive—ships, armies, countryside.

We feasted grandly in his halls for days, driven wild with pleasure by the availability of food, of shelter, of comfort after so many months in wasting absence of the luxury we had grown accustomed to.

But we brought the sickness with us, on our horses and our bodies, though it could not effect us.

The entire community fell ill within the week.

We had no choice but to feast upon the sick, and it haunted our bodies like coal in our skin, like acid to the tongue, like daggers and barbed metal to the stomach, and my fingers shook with dread as I was racked with fits, coughing up blackness, weak and cold, and paper-thin.

Days fell into each other and blurred into nights. It was as disorienting as the sun burning out and the moon curling into shade of darkness, never to be seen again.

I had no memory of falling unconscious, or near to it, when I felt his hands on me. On my back, strong but weary, pulling me to sit from the slumped position I had taken over the chair while I sat on the floor. Torches burned around us in the room, but the halls were silent, empty like the dead, but for the moaning cries of those that were dying still.

"'Bekah, I'm so sorry," he said, or did he? I could not decipher the realness of the world from the agony inside any longer, it was a haze, a lead curtain pulled over me, and I could no longer struggle to pull it off. "You have to drink, love. Drink."

In my mind I heard my father's voice, the same anger and fear in the tone that was speaking to me as the one I had learned to hate in memory. _Drink! _forcing me to complete the transition all those centuries ago, so I struggled. Delusional. Exhausted.

Nik shoved me, my fangs, into the still-warm neck of a dying woman. Dying not from my ministrations, but from the plague's own.

The prospect of a meal I could keep down enticed my ravenous body to respond, but I was gagging with disappointment as I tasted the bitter and acrid flavor of the sick-blood. I choked on it, coughed it out even as I took it back, but he would not let up.

"It's the only way, Rebekah!" he growled, not a curse but a plea. He was trying to keep us alive.

All of us.

I do not know how, but his wolf-side preserved him greater strength. And though his power ebbed, he remained with mastery over himself, even as we all spiraled into hunger, madness, on the edges of desiccation. I wondered barely about Elijah and Kol, couldn't recall how long I had been in that room, and sobbed with the remaining strength I had, fighting the urge not to wretch back all the poison blood he forced us to consume.

He held me cradled in his arms, and that at least, would have been my comfort should I have fallen into desiccation there upon him. Peace and pain mingled as one. As Nik has always been to me.

In my weakness I gripped helplessly at his tunic. "Nik," I said, voicing all my world of fear in the simple utterance of his name. I had no question that he understood me. It seemed like a pilgrim's effort to bring my eyes to his face, but he tipped my chin with his fingers and steadied me.

"Take me away from here," I said. But what I meant? The knowledge of _pain_, the realization of what death truly meant, the quaking and black definition, the horror at myself and all our disregard for so many centuries. The murders not borne of feeding. The violence. The wars and massacres, the epidemic and the corpses that stacked like playing cards at every edge of civilization. It would never end and we would always be part of it. For all of history, all of time.

But he knew.

Nik always knew.

"I can't," he said, as broken as I had ever heard him, his tone echoing the cries he mewled as Henrik died in his arms. So strange it was to feel that memory come alive, so suddenly, in color where so much had been only darkness since. And in this room where no one would ever hear him, on this continent of death where not an ear existed to listen, my brother admitted again in tormented words. "You know I can't."

He kissed my cold forehead, and somehow his lips felt like they were burning.

We have died many deaths together, my beloved brother and I.


End file.
